 Welcome to the first talk of the semester in the weekly brown bike series of the Archeological Research Facility, the ARF, at UC Berkeley. I'm Sarah Kansa, Program Associate at the ARF, which is a hub for archaeology on the UC Berkeley campus with a mission to encourage, facilitate and expedite field and laboratory research conducted by archaeologists and related specialists engaged with the human past. The ARF provides annual grants and shared lab space in support of faculty and graduate student research. We also host a longstanding weekly lecture series and other special events throughout the year. And more recently, we're developing a local computer field school to provide essential field work experience to Bay Area based students underrepresented in the discipline of archaeology. So I'm speaking to you today from Berkeley, California, the ancestral and unceded territory of Chicheno speaking alone people, successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. We acknowledge that this land remains of great importance to the Alameda people, and that the ARF community inherits a history of archaeological scholarship that has disturbed Alameda ancestors and erased living Alameda people from the present and future of this land. It's therefore our collective responsibility to critically transform our archaeological inheritance in support of Alameda sovereignty and to hold the University of California accountable to the needs of all American Indian and indigenous people. Joining us today for our first talk of the semester is Paulina for stupa, who will speak about how the field of archaeology and the knowledge generated in the field is used in popular culture in comic books written by non archaeologists. Paulina is the postdoctoral researcher in data visualization and reproducibility at the Alexandria archive Institute, a local nonprofit organization that develops the archaeology data publishing service open context. She's a Philippine Polish Canadian American settler in North America and an anthropology student graduate student at the University of New Mexico. Her dissertation examines the built environments of children's institutions in the United States between 1865 and 1935. In her interest in studying archaeologies of education and teaching as a postdoctoral researcher at the AI Paulina and her colleague L Megan Dennis are developing a series of data stories to assess and cultivate data literacy and archaeology. She's also a research associate associate of the indigenous digital archive, a new method of online access to historical documents that's aimed at creating effective access to large quantities of public records of government boarding schools in New Mexico into the 1930s. Additionally, and the subject of today's talk. She enjoys exploring the intersections between popular cultural culture and archaeology, looking at how the public understands learns from and utilizes archaeological knowledge and fictional works. She writes about interviews comics movies and shows at the website when and write about comments and moderates panels of popular cultural conventions, bringing an anthropological and academic perspective to popular media. She has appeared on the Asians represent podcast curiosity and focus and the archaeological fantasies podcast talking about her work and what archaeology can bring to world building and fiction. So Paulina welcome and thank you very much for coming to speak with us today. Thank you Sarah for that wonderful introduction, and I'm just going to share my screen now. So, go. All right. Um, so usually when I give a talk on behalf of the Alexandria archive Institute, my slides look a little bit like this. Because of the subject matter for today's talk and because this research started before I was a postdoctoral researcher, I'm going to shift into a slightly different style, one that is slightly more appropriate for the subject matter. So, as Sarah said today I'm going to be talking about archaeology and comics, the intersections between pop culture and material culture. And for those of you that might just be listening I have switched to a screen that has a dark purple background with yellow text and comics sans more specifically. And Sarah had a really excellent land acknowledgement I'm not going to add to that. I am going to mention though that land acknowledgments are part of sort of an ongoing discussion about how to acknowledge the fact that many of us are settlers on indigenous lands here in North America, and mentioned that actually the Association of indigenous anthropologists requested the halting of land acknowledgments from their perspective and if you are unfamiliar with this. It was talked about in October of 2021 sapiens reposted the article that outlines what folks were kind of interested in talking about as as for why we're doing lined acknowledgments and what influence and effect they actually had. It was a great effort of doing and and being an ally and an accomplice to the goals of indigenous peoples. I like to talk about active things that we can do as settlers and allies. And one of the first things I always recommend is to just understand what the purpose of land acknowledgments are. Obviously projects has a really good PDF that outlines why we should be doing land acknowledgments, and I think it's important to read something like that to then understand the critique of them. And I also think that there are other steps we can do of course a very basic one is to figure out whose land we're actually on and native land dot CA is a really great starting point for that. We can do things like educate ourselves about movements like the land back movement we can support indigenous reporting a struggle through the red nation, and other things that I like doing are. You can do things like support the honor native land tax which has a calculator, where you can put in sort of different things about your life experience how long your family's been in the United States, and it'll actually calculate how much tax you owe indigenous peoples. And that particular initiative is out of the American Southwest as I am here in Albuquerque, New Mexico. But if you're interested in supporting something that's a little bit more local to the Bay Area. There is the so go right a land trust that's also doing land back initiatives that you can participate in and spread the word about. Okay, with that sort of out of the way. So what am I going to actually be talking about today. Well I'm going to first start and talk about who I am. Sarah gave me a really wonderful introduction, but I want to give a little bit of my own voice to that introduction, and to use that to give context as to why I am actually looking at comic books and archaeology. I'm going to talk about some of my preliminary research regarding archaeology and comics that started in about 2017. And then I'm going to shift to some particular examples of archaeology and comic books that are written by non archaeologists to examine sort of the good, the bad and ugly as far as it comes to archaeological representation, and particularly the kind of archaeologists. I want to end though on discussion of how as archaeologists we can leverage comics to more generally cultivate archaeological data literacy, not only within our classrooms but also out in the community. I also want to state that some of the comics that I'm going to talk about today do contain depictions of fictional verbal abuse and suicide. That might be sensitive to those topics. All right, so who am I, as Sarah already said, I am a post doctoral researcher at the Alexandria archive Institute. I'm also though through some series of funny events I'm still a graduate student at the University of New Mexico. I'm mixed race Asian European descent specifically Philippine and Polish. I'm also a first generation immigrant to the United States and was raised in the Pacific Northwest and Lower mainland regions. And I always think it's important to explicitly state my background regardless of what I'm talking about because my personal history does influence how I do research it influences what questions I can ask, and the knowledge I bring to these topics. And so despite the image in this particular slide I'm not direct Italian descent. And I also really enjoy using this particular slide to talk about research, because it captures a very genuine moment that I experienced a frustration doing research and what was really funny when I found this photo was I actually don't remember taking it. I had to have set this up on a different table and set a timer, but there was clearly something about the work I was looking at that really annoyed me a little bit and it caught me right at that moment. And while I really enjoy doing research, a lot of the things that I do research on whether it's comic books, or children institutions is kind of hard to process and can cause a lot of frustration. And I think that's important to acknowledge as also part of the practice of doing archaeology. Okay, so how and why did I start looking at comics. Well, I think more generally popular culture is really important for understanding how archaeology as a field is understood by the public. It helps us get an idea of what does actually the public like about archaeology, but it also gives us a really great example to evaluate what the public misunderstands, even though there's a lot of scientific archaeological information out there that's easily accessible. And I just became really interested in this you know what does the public actually get from us if they're not talking to us and being in directly in our communities. I was also really excited about comics because I've honestly really always loved comic books. Comics are one of the things that actually got me interested in reading. Before I sort of discovered comic books, or was read certain books in class, I absolutely hated reading and I don't think that I would probably be here as an academic, if it wasn't for comics and more specifically, my heart or the things that I really love about or about comic books started with Japanese comics which are also referred to as manga. And when I was going back to sort of look for non Western examples of when archaeology comes up in comics. I went back to these roots and found that one of the first manga I ever read, which was called card captor Sakura actually has an archaeologist character. He doesn't come up a lot because he's her dad and not the main character. But of all things, the main characters dad is in fact an archaeologist he's an archaeology professor. And while the story is fantastical about this girl who is recapturing magical cards that she released into the world. I actually feel like the superhero of the comic is actually her dad, who happens to be a single parent of two kids is able to somehow make breakfast for his parents, his children, and still somehow hold a very prominent position at a university. That guy's got a lot on his plate is probably working really hard to be able to do that. But I just really always loved comics and they really bring an aspect of literacy that we don't always think about as being part of archaeology is something that can be really, really useful on both educationally, but also as a way for us to communicate what we know. And so I started in 2016 2017 sort of connecting these ideas about pop culture and material culture together in a personal blog I needed a little bit of a reprieve from working on my other research, and blogging about a lot of these ideas that I had started talking about with friends seemed like a really good way to start to put these ideas out there. And it also made me kind of sit down and write and think about these from an academic perspective, start to gather citations and stuff like that. Because there I wasn't seeing a lot of connection between the academic sphere and the pop culture sphere, at least one that was, you know, really engaging in real dialogue. And as I was sort of looking for examples, I kept coming across like material culture being a really big part of pop culture, like anytime we see a relic or an ancient object, or people travel back in time that's all archaeology coming into popular culture. And I wanted to engage with that a little bit more because it has a lot of implications for how folks understand our science, but also how we can use those different modes to actually teach archaeology, and use those as counter points in the discussions that we might be bringing into our classrooms. Well, this comes up a lot in things like movies. I wanted to focus on comics specifically, because they were a big hobby that I had picked up in of all things in graduate school, because of course work life balance is really important so why not take my past time and turn it into an academic pursuit. But I thought that was a really fun thing it was something that was capturing me and really kind of propelling me to keep going in my research and in my academic career. But I also think before I continue talking about them, it would be important to give you all a definition for comics because you might not be familiar with the idea of comics being a medium rather than a genre. One of the things that I choose to use is from Scott McLeod's understanding comics, and comics are in the plural juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence intended to convey information and or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer. So, anytime we have a sequence of pictorial or images that are put together to create some sort of narrative or to communicate something. Those are all comics. And what I love about McLeod's work in general is that he extends the starting point for comics, or this idea of visual storytelling, all the way back to an archaeological source. He recreates in his graphic novel, The Tomb of Mena, and explains how this still captures all of the things that are required for understanding modern comics. And it was just so cool to see how this thing that modernly used archaeological information also just exists in the deep past as well. And I love this intersection between this modern thing I loved and the fact that it has its own really, really deep history. But I also want to point out that this way of storytelling, putting images in sequence, doesn't have to be focused just on superheroes. And I will be talking a little bit about superheroes. A lot of the stories where archaeologists come up don't necessarily have anything to do with superpowered people. They are oftentimes fictionalized. There are, you know, sci-fi elements, but it's not necessarily just like pow boxes and big fights. It's a lot of things that come down to daily operations. And I thought that was really cool that those daily things of archaeology were also coming up in comic books. So just to stress again, comics are a medium and not a genre. And so as I said, you know, work-life balance, I wanted to start bringing these ideas together. And so to start to kind of put them into the academic sphere, I decided that I would put together a very small conference, or not a small conference, a small conference presentation for the 2017 public archaeology Twitter conference. Because I wanted to sort of have a place where I could reference back to say, hey, here are some of my academic ideas. I've been thinking about these for a little bit of time and I wanted to start to share them back with my academic community. This was back before Twitter expanded its character limit. So I only had 140 characters to put all of my ideas together. And I was limited to just 12 tweets. This thread is still active on Twitter. But I just had a few comics that I wanted to talk very specifically about. And these were my first steps into looking at archaeology and comics as a sort of research venture. And in that series of tweets, I established a sort of typology for archaeology and comics. There is, of course, bleeding between the three. But I think it was an important way to sort of structure what kind of comics I was going to be looking at in different contexts. And the first category that I defined was how we do archaeology. So these are comics that might be semi autobiographical, they, they might be written by archaeologists or often are written by archaeologists or people who are in adjacent professions. The next category might act as notes or journals or be put together specifically to teach a particular aspect of the archaeological record. The next category are works that depict the culture of archaeologists. So a character in the story might be an archaeologist, like with Cardcaptor Sakura with her dad, or they might just be in the background or, you know, in a passing thing they might be mentioned. The last category of comics are ones that draw specifically from archaeological information to color the content or setting. So these are primarily works that are going to be set in the past. And they might consult archaeological materials or look at museum collections and use those as inspiration to create a particular place or to recreate a particular place. And all of these have value and can be utilized for educational purposes when we start to talk about archaeology more generally. So the first kind of the ones that focus on how we do archaeology are really cool. The example that I use in my Patsy or public archaeology Twitter conference example is called exit archaeology by Glenis Fox. And this particular zine collected comics that Glenis had put together on her last field season in Greece working as an archaeological illustrator. And it was just a really great combination of highly accurate archaeological illustrations of sherds and that sort of thing, but also just her feelings about processing choosing to leave archaeology. It's a great sort of personal story and a personal look at one particular kind of archaeologist. And I see this comic as kind of in dialogue with other sorts of comics that are about how we do archaeology, such as those that are oftentimes illustrated by Roger, such as the Center for Applied Isotope Studies radio carbon dating or unlocking the past series, as well as the as nag pro comics written by Sonya Adelaide and others. These are both comics that are written specifically by archaeologists for educational purposes, and they're really great teaching aids I've used both when I've taught introductions to archaeology, and it's really great to be able to provide different sort of literacy to engage with archaeological information. There are occasionally pitfalls I really like that the radio carbon dating comic focuses very specifically on how radio carbon dating works. There is a little bit of an issue in the writing of that comic though because one of the main archaeologists is a white presenting male archaeologist. When he starts talking about the artifact that he's dating he talks about it as finding the date for our ancestors. And the problem with that is that the example that they're giving is actually from Alaska, and from North America specifically. And so that archaeologist is not talking about our ancestors because not all of our ancestors are from North America. And well there are things that are very valuable from this comic in general. I also like pointing out the, the spots of difference or the spots of discussion that can come up from these, so that our students are constantly thinking about how archaeology is changing and in dialogue and in the places where we can improve this discussion, even when we ourselves are writing. So the next kind of comics that I identified are comics that depict the culture of archaeologists. So as I said in the beginning, these can be examples like card capture Sakura where archaeology is mentioned but not really under discussion it's not the main focus. There are in comics like giant days where it's a subclot overall to the story that really focuses on what it's like to be an undergraduate in, in England. And one of the people one of the main women characters happens to be an archaeology major. And I'll talk more about this comic later on because it's a really great example of a non archaeologist writing about archaeology in a way that is very, very close to home and very, very accurate. And the last group are comics that use archaeological knowledge as a content or setting. These are often time will not necessarily oftentimes but this example here Clovis is independently published and reaches a slightly smaller audience. And a lot of these comics that might more specifically be interested in being accurate to archaeology don't necessarily have the same reach because they're going for a different sort of thing. So Clovis miles grab, I've chatted with him a little bit about his interest, and he was really interested in wanting to portray the Clovis period in North America as accurately as possible. With the exception of course of the main character having a pet giant slot, which was just really fun. But he made sure that the stone artifacts were drawn or illustrated in a way that really reflected Clovis points and drew from other archaeological knowledge to illustrate the past as accurately as possible. And as I was kind of wrapping up thinking about these comics. I a particular comic book came to mind. And this was of course from a major publisher. And so I talked about it as when I was thinking about these stories and thinking about these categories, a flaming mammoth entered my view. And so in late 2017, I got word of a new comic series that was going to be published by Marvel, called the Avengers of one million BC, and particularly, if you all saw the advertisement for this particular talk. There is a man astride a flaming mammoth and there is something extremely captivating about this image, it just, it's clearly archaeological, it's vibrant it's something that really reels you in. But as I started digging more and more into this crossover event, the more and more I was a little or very uncomfortable with the things that were happening in it. And I started thinking about it and thinking about it and so I started I wrote an essay on my personal blog, but I couldn't stop thinking about it even though I had gotten a lot of the ideas out there. And it was suggested to me that maybe instead of just writing for myself, I reached out to another platform. And I didn't think I was quite ready to turn this into an academic publication. And I felt that this dialogue wasn't one I needed to have with other academics. This was a dialogue I needed to have with the public. And so I ended up editing that essay and republishing it on women write about comics, which is now referred to as will whack. And so it became the article, the pre human Avengers archaeology and Marvel's Avengers of 1 million BC. And starting from there, I just decided that will whack became a really great home for me to put all of these ideas together and so over the years, I just continued to write about archaeology and anthropology and comics for this public facing website. Myself and my colleague who I believe is in the audience staff home offer have collaborated and written sort of alternatively or both for the two archaeologists kind of on staff for will whack. And we keep talking about archaeology so that the public gets a little bit more than just a fun story when it comes to when archaeology appears in comic books. So this was the sort of start of me wanting to kind of formalize this a little bit more into a specific research focus that I had. And so my more recent work. Although there are a lot of comics written by archaeologists and there was even a an issue of the essay archaeological record that was specifically on comics in 2005. So I'm really picking up on this discussion within the academic community. And I also felt that I, while it's important for us to engage with this and to think about these things from an educational perspective or how they can be used to expand literacies. I really wanted this to be a conversation we had with the public, because they're clearly interested in archaeology. They just don't always know where to get information or how to engage with archaeologists. So I wanted to make sure that I was engaging directly with the public as much as possible. But first, I wanted to know what does the public actually know. And to do that I thought the best way to sort of address this was to look at comics that were published by the comics publishers. These are things like Marvel DC image comics dark horse comics, and boom, I am of course, going from the comics definition of the big comics publishers, things like Harper Collins and Randall de Meyers drama have much more circulation. But that is a different sort of discussion than what I want to talk about today. But there are just in general a lot of popular comics that explore archaeology and archaeologists. There's inspiration that's drawn from from deep history that people really enjoy, enjoy utilizing. And I really liked the idea that I was able to get a kind of slice of what average archaeological data literacy looks like in the community. So I titled this section at the beginning, the good, the bad and the ugly, just to capture the range of portrayals of archaeology and more specifically of archaeologists in popular comics that were published in the last 10 years. So I'm going to start off with giant days. I mentioned giant days earlier as an example of when the culture of archaeologists are included in a particular comic book. And I use giant days as a good portrayal, but keep the idea of good at the back of your mind for more like accurate rather than necessarily creative. So in general archaeology is a supplement to the story because Daisy Wooten, who is pictured here with very large hair in a pink t-shirt and glasses and reminding her colleague, which is something that we should always remind our colleagues when you're in the field to put sunscreen on regardless of whether or not it's overcast is the main is the main character of this and issue 17 particularly of the comic series focuses on the first time she gets to be in the field, which everyone probably remembers their first time in the field so it's really great to have this illustrated by someone who's a non archaeologist but clearly knows enough to put this into their book. We see her participate in the every day of working on an archaeological site. And if you start giant days from the beginning, another really cool thing about seeing Daisy do this work is that she's actually biracial she is Caribbean and British. And so she's a another woman of color in archaeology and it's really great to get to see her. And it's clear that the artist and the writer knew enough about archaeology to put in others little Easter eggs. In other scenes you'll see that her shirt actually actually reads its team time which is a reference of course to the British archaeology with the American spin off television show time team. And one of the archaeologists they they work with looks is a little bit similar to one of the archaeological hosts from that show Phil Harding. And of course, the cover for issue 17 has this great mishmash of archaeological artifacts from Vikings and sarcophagi to dinosaurs and I'm for I and so it's just this really kind of fun celebration of archaeology and archaeology and artifacts. And while archaeology doesn't necessarily come up a lot in the series when it does come up it it accurately portrays our field. Unfortunately, it doesn't necessarily portray our field in a way that's particularly positive. And so, when Daisy first excavates, she unfortunately gets hounded by a white presenting male supervising archaeologist for doing it wrong over and over again. And while a field is changing. I found these scenes to be extremely telling for something that the public sees in archaeology that even now we are only just starting to address. And the fact that the author chose to highlight, not you know the cool things she found, but the fact of this really toxic interaction with her supervisor was really important, because it's something that I was not aware that the public was aware of. And as a side set of scenes, it's really, really insightful. It's a reminder of the difficulties that a lot of archaeology students experience when they are first in this field. It's also a really important experience to remind us of who gets seen by non archaeologists, and these are oftentimes rude white presenting men who think they know everything. And I think actually the worst part whenever I bring up this example is that when I describe this person. I get the feeling that basically everyone in the room it's currently just me, but everyone in these presentations knows someone like this and it's a really kind of sad reality of being an archaeology. However, thankfully, Daisy gets to have agency, and she gets to respond back to this person. She stands up for herself and despite these negative impressions, she's able to state her voice that she's not doing something wrong she's a student, and she doesn't know what she's doing and you're here to help me and why aren't you helping me and it's so great to get to see a character do that which is not something that a lot of students actually are able to do. And despite this negative experience she stays in archaeology and by the end of the series she is a full archaeologist. And while I think the comic mentions the idea of curses a few too many times. I really love that we get this narrative arc of someone entering the field, having a negative experience but being able to stand up for themselves, and still choosing to commit themselves to the field I just think that's a really great way to have, even though archaeology in general is not something that comes up a lot in the comic. I really love that giant days had archaeology at all and did such a great job of illustrating something that's very complicated and very hard for the field to reckon with, but still celebrated the idea that like, we are still here women of color are still in archaeology despite a lot of setbacks. So that's the good portrayal not necessarily positive but a really accurate portrayal of what archaeology is like. Let's shift now to the bad. So you probably got the sense that when I first introduced the Avengers of one million BC, I was going to talk about how it's not really a great portrayal of archaeology in comics. I have started referring to them as the Avengers of 1.002 million years ago, just because that's probably how we as archaeologists would have referred to them. And they're relatively recent addition to the Marvel Universe in general. They first appear in comics and Marvel Legacy number one, and that's part of a crossover event where old versions of particular superheroes meet their new counterparts. So notice in this promotional image that we have an example of a Thor, a Black Panther, a Phoenix, a Hulk like character, an iron fist and an ancient one who is the equivalent of Dr. Strange. And they of course have our delightful flaming mammoth riding ghost rider. And if you just look at the images, their designs their weaponry and their environments all clearly draw from archaeological knowledge. The big change of course being that ghost rider has swapped his motorcycle or more recently his low rider car for a flaming mammoth. What was also really cool about this first issue is that there is a contemporary period that has some modern archaeologists. And while all of this looks cool on the surface as we start to read a little bit more into the issue. We start to feel a little bit less okay. So of course, my, my big issue with this is the, the one million part, you can kind of pretend that the decimal point doesn't exist is just there for hyperbole. Okay, that's fine but you know at one point zero zero two million years ago, homo sapiens hadn't quite evolved. So, I don't know it just kind of breaks my willingness to suspend my disbelief. And so that order of magnitude is just a little bit too far. Additionally, it's something that you can Google search you can start you can Google search you know where you know when homo sapiens evolve, and the writer didn't take the time to do that and it's kind of disappointing. Unfortunately, I can kind of absolve that issue if that was the only problem with this comics portrayal of the past, the more insidious things are the fact that human evolution and, and superpowers and the idea of homo sapiens are very much tied into the legacies of archaeology that have to do with race. And I think it's very important to point out that the majority of the superpowered individuals in this team, although they are not all European featured, the majority of them are light skinned. And the current research on the evolution and transition of light and dark pigmentation suggests that by one million years ago when this particular story supposed to be set homo sapiens if if they were around or homo ancestors would have been darkly skinned. They don't have the majority of superpowered individuals not have that is kind of bad, because there is a legacy of associating power in this case superpowers with with light skinned individuals, oftentimes at the expense of darkly pigmented people. And this is also not really great because in that issue they do have at least one shot of a non homo sapien ancestor, and that ended in those people are our dark skin, and so it creates this really really awkward tension in the comic. And so as much as I really love this flaming mammoth image there are a lot of underlying racist tones with this that are not addressed in the issue. Additionally, and this is more of an issue that archaeologists would find annoying is that the modern period part of this comic has something really cool it's got non colonizer archaeologists or African archaeologists in this specific example, running an archaeological excavation which is really really cool. Unfortunately, once again, the author didn't do their homework and has them misuse lidar. They suggest that lidar can penetrate into rocks or penetrate down into the ground. And it's an understandable error but it's a kind of sad, or an unfortunate example of misrepresentation particularly when archaeologists color struggle in the field so much as it's a not quite the representation representation we're looking for. So going from this, how do you think we might get even uglier. Well, folks are probably most familiar with Tomb Raider as as a as a property that is in video games and comics and movies, and is sort of unfortunately for femme presenting archaeologists one of the few examples we have of a femme presenting archaeologists in in recent times. Tomb Raider can do a lot of good but tends to not. And the current series that I'm going to interrogate is based on the 2013 reboot of the video game. And generally Laura stories I've read a variety of her comics from 2013 onwards. And they have her fame, her, her saving different people in her life or going after artifacts. And they, you know, depict her continually in the same way she has been historically she's still upper class she's still rich. She's still white a brunette and British and she does archaeology. It's important that these comics specifically identify that she has a degree in archaeology, and for this established that canonically that she actually works for the British realm. And it's really good in some ways to have this clear connection between a professional woman and our profession. And we get to see her knowledge, a lot in the comics. She has internal monologues to describe archaeological artifact she talks with others, and it's clear that she typically know know her stuff. However, Laura gets talked about a lot. And so I'm going to focus on a different archaeologist that comes up in these in least in one of the particular mini series in Tomb Raider. And that is a woman named Nadia cut Lego Nadia cut Lego is a black Bosnian archaeologist who only currently appears in the mini series Tomb Raider inferno. And what's really cool about Nadia is that she shows up as a counterpoint to Laura Laura. She's overall just really cool. We get to find out that she wrote a dissertation at the age of just 18 on on the antiquities trade. And we just see her develop a lot of really great physical skills, but also a lot of really great intellectual skills. She seems comfortable and easy and happy in the world she has a physician of power. She understands a lot and is able to speak comfortably about a lot of archaeological topics, and they set her up in this series to be a really cool character. But the writers didn't spend a lot of time thinking about the implications of this character with what they chose to do with this chose to do with her. And I think it's important to point out that we have another really great or not really great but we actually have representation of black archaeologists once again in this comic. Unfortunately, this is where things sort of start to unravel. This is an example that I like to use from the comic. So you have Laura and Nadia to fem or women archaeologists, talking about this archaeological site that they've just repelled down into. However, they're just, they're talking about an archaeological concept, but get things really, really wrong. So this first issue or this first picture talks about how old it is and Laura says it's pre Cambrian, and Nadia points to the icing says the bones agree. Unfortunately, nothing in the pre Cambrian had bones and unless Nadia is pointing out for him and if we're there, the bones do not agree actually because those are from a very, very different period. And this misstep in knowledge kind of undercuts all of this cool work that they did to set her to set Nadia up as a knowledgeable archaeologists. And it's also kind of terrible because although Nadia studies and is really great. She was necessary. She, according to the authors had to have a really traumatic backstory she survives a massacre. And on top of this, within a few pages of this scene, both of the characters experience a psychedelic event. And Laura is able to pull herself out of it and Nadia is quite not able to Laura pulls her out though of the of this terrible situation. But because of this psychedelic event, Nadia is not in her right mind anymore, and they choose to have her commit suicide. So I was to a certain degree happy that this was not something that they depicted actively in the comic it's something that happens between panels using the comics concept of closure. Unfortunately, it detaches the reader from a kind of violence that black women experience in the world more generally. And I don't like that it uses comics to detach ourselves from that experience. It certainly highlights that to a certain degree the suffering of black women in a lot of fields is put outside of the view of the field rather than something that we need to actively engage with and actively explore and fight against in our field. And so, while the missteps on their own are small, when they're considered in context they have a lot more to say about the field than they might initially think about. So this is a lot. I took a very happy, a very happy idea, you know, comics and pop culture and thought about the serious implications of this relationship. And I think it's important for us as archaeologists to see this harm that comes to particular subgroups of archaeologists is to start to engage with that discussion, so that we can do more than just comment blithely but so that we can dismantle white supremacist ideals that still are part of public facing or discussions amongst the public about archaeology because they just don't know what we're dealing with in the field. And also to support a woman of color and particularly black women archaeologists and uplifting their voices as much as possible so that they aren't just put to the side are always used as as sort of sacrifices for other kinds of archaeologists. And so what can we do as academics to start to push back against these narratives and in the communities who actually consume these works so we are not complicit in the issues that they might perpetuate. One of the things that I do, or have done sort of before the pat the pandemic was to organize panels at archaeology at pop culture conventions. And I so I started doing this on a variety of topics, but one of my favorite ones that I got to do was a panel called it belongs in a museum. It's based on museums in fact in fiction. I brought together a group of a variety of archaeologists and former archaeologists museum professionals, and we went to a pop culture convention talks to a large group of people. And they got to listen to us talk about the colonial histories of archaeology, the positives and negatives this is the year the Black Panther came out so we just talked about how great it was to see that engagement with the the negative legacies of museums. And we just had this group full of people asking us questions engaging with our dialogue, and really got this feeling that the public wants to do better. They just don't necessarily know who to ask or where to ask. And this is something that I think that everyone can really do because organizing stuff for comics conventions is actually not that hard you just have to know who to ask and where to start bringing your ideas. I really like that cons are outside the space of academics or the ivory tower, and we're going to the public's home turf, and I like this idea that we don't don't only bring our knowledge to each other but we actually bring our knowledge to stakeholders in their own places. I want to think about this way like different ways that we can do that academics we can of course do things like interact with creators and various publics on Twitter or other social media platforms, just reaching outside of academia into academic into creative cultures. We can look also at comics as something that we incorporate into archaeology as something that we regularly teach and use as a starting point for dialogue for people who are just entering the field. They also add an aspect of visual literacy that's not always underscored in introductory archaeology classes that I think is really important considering how much we use visuals in archaeology more generally. As I said, consider organizing panels for your local pop culture events, some of my favorite events that have been most well attended are ones that are actually for smaller audiences so not necessarily San Diego Comic Con, but stuff that has a dedicated small audience as often more willing to engage with talks and you can get that connection with your local community. And I also more generally want to think about reaching into into our communities a lot of my work is of course in the United States, but this incorporation of visual storytelling is something that you can do with a variety of communities, as it's part of a lot of different cultures. So are there ways that you could be collaborating with your community to use comics and visual storytelling as something that you do to connect with those local communities as part of engagement. I also have continued to write for a whack is it's something that I really enjoy doing. And I can talk a little bit more about some of my more recent articles, one of them critiques the idea of writing a comic about using about the Vikings in North America, and the other one looks at the possibility of me and her tolls arriving here in spaceships. But with that, I want to thank you all for being here with me for this time for sharing your lunch with me here are some of the references for the comics and works that I talked about in this. And of course, thank you all for being here. Thanks to the melon for funding my post doctoral research, and all of the wonderful people who have helped me get to this place. And yeah, with that, thank you so much, and have a great day. Thanks so much Collina that was fascinating. And I'm sure people must have some questions so if you want to stop sharing I guess and everyone can come on to the screen then if people have questions you can either raise your hand or you can just show yourself and ask your question. You can also post a question into the chat box if you prefer. Okay, so Rosario Torres. Yes, I, I was really fascinating I really enjoyed your presentation. Have you worked with a local artist and doing comics yourself. No, I've not. My is something that I would like to do in the future. But it's not something that that I've done yet my my own research is very sensitive and I don't necessarily think necessarily appropriate for my my dissertation research, but it is something that I'd like to do in the future. And I think that if that's some there are also really great spots for possibly starting these collaborations. There's a website which some folks might be familiar with called the nib, and they particularly like posting sort of infographic or more information based comics. And if you have a particular historical story you want to tell, they'll actually pair you with an artist and I haven't quite figured out exactly what story archaeology wise is most appropriate for me to tell, but it's a resources on my sort of the back of my mind of something that I'd like to leverage. And I have some friends who have worked with the nib before and so I, I kind of know where to go but I haven't quite done that yet as I've got some other research priorities currently up right now but yeah it's something I would like to do in the future. Thank you so much for asking. Yeah, thank you so much. Other questions. I'd like to ask Paulina about in the beginning you showed some educational comment that you mentioned some educational comics are those available for people to access somewhere. Yes. So yeah both the nag for comics and the Center for stable isotope comics are available online and I'm going to put them into the chat right now. And there are going to be more nag for comics and I'm just sort of like waiting for them are you like check back every couple months, because they're they're telling a variety of specific stories of repatriation. So the first issue journeys to complete the work. I believe specifically is about the University of Michigan's nag for issues. And they're going to be a couple others that they that they're putting together and have planned. There's also one on archaeological metallurgy that that the Center for applied isotope studies has available as well. When I was first using it for class actually I email just the center to be like, hey, could I get a digital copy of your radio carbon comic, and they're like oh you know what's your mailing address and I'm like, it's this I just see the PDF, and they ended up sending me like a stack of 25 comic books and so I was able to give them out to my students to use as references. And I think there's something really fun to about the tact, tactility of having a comic like that in your hands as well for for engaging with comics. That's great. So you obviously teach with these do you know of other people who teach things like this and or who can you build it into your course like just in, you know, as a sort of module. I think it would be really easy to to incorporate this into teaching it's, I haven't incorporated the public facing art like the comics written by non archaeologists into my teaching. But it's something that I'd like to do as part of the data literacy program perhaps put together a sort of archaeological data literacy reading list for folks that's comic specific. Because it also gets that ideas of various age ranges for people comics are a lot more accessible for kids. But you know as an adult who doesn't always have a lot of time. Comics are something that I can read and consume stories of even when I'm really stressed out and so I don't think that they're just a thing that we should use with with early, early readers but something that we can use with readers of all ages. Any other comments. Okay. Well, thank you so much for coming today Paulina that was fabulous and thanks everyone for joining us we hope we will see you at one of our next brown bags coming up. Thank you so much stuff. Good afternoon everybody. Take care.